Government ministers are busy people: their visibility answering questions in parliament, appearing on the Today programme or making official visits is merely the tip of a vast iceberg of paperwork, meetings, briefings and policy development. Yet all this effort seems undervalued. There have been repeated reports in the past 10 years from political colleagues who insist there are just too many of them. The public administration select committee has examined the matter in detail but its recommendations for fewer ministers working more effectively gather dust under both the last Labour government and the coalition. The number of ministers has been rising inexorably for the last 100 years and efforts to persuade governments they should set a fixed proportion of their backbenchers are rebuffed. Patronage remains the most efficient lubricant of party loyalty. Now, with 119 MPs and peers in government, and at least another 46 MPs serving as parliamentary aides, the coalition is hitting new records. The argument that fewer MPs (down to 600 after the next election) should be accompanied by a similar cut in the size of government has also been rejected. Yet outside the thinktanks, there has been little public consideration of what ministers are for, how to train them, nor how to calculate their productivity – while assessing and promoting competence has always lagged far behind condemning incompetence. In an era of savage cuts, it's high time ministers themselves felt the pain.